Highly Questionable Marketing: Recent Episodes
Elevate Demand
Welcome to Highly Questionable Marketing. On this podcast we'll discuss and debate current marketing topics and trends in B2B while offering more practical advice for your average B2B marketer.
Q1 is tough for a lot of B2B marketing teams. We discuss how to make it through the rest of the year so you can develop quick wins and accelerate your growth.
Marketing leaders have a choice between thriving or surviving in 2023, and with that in mind Jay Baron, CEO of Elevate Demand and Joergen Aaboe discuss 6 action items marketing leaders need to take action on to thrive.
There's a lot of talk around running marketing more like science with a scientific approach to finding and scaling revenue generating programs. Jay Baron and Joergen Aaboe discuss this new approach and if it truly helps lead you towards sustainable and scalable marketing programs.
We're at it again with our 2023 predictions. The real predictions that most marketing personalities won't make.
We review our 2022 predictions to see how we did. With the usual hot takes and recaps that lacks in marketing.
2022 is coming to a close and recession or not it's going to get harder for B2B marketing teams. Marketers all over on defense now because of the LinkedIn echo chamber that pushes the biggest growth issue as a marketing issue and it's not.
We breakdown the discussion of measuring marketing on intent based leads and pipeline velocity. Is this a trap for marketing leaders and what it takes to actually create meaningful demand. Most of the time it falls outside of marketings control. Then we take a look at all the "led-growth" and if it's really a "led-growth" strategy or just a new buzzword.
Most marketing teams are stuck in capturing demand—and the conventional wisdom is now to adjust your strategy to creating demand. We break down if marketing teams (especially in B2B SaaS) can truly create demand or if this is the latest buzzword in B2B marketing.
Conventional wisdom right now in B2B marketing says look at pipeline and revenue to adjust your marketing strategy. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Just because your teams look at data doesn't mean you're working on the most impactful areas of growth. In fact, chances are marketing, sales, and product are speaking different languages on how the company actually grows regardless of aligning and looking at the same data.
The key to getting out of the false struggle in B2B marketing isn't just getting out of tactics it's getting the entire company aligned on a single growth opportunity. Until the company sits down and defines the actual growth strategy and how buyers experience the core value of the product your marketing will always struggle trying to execute through the fog while sales, product, and marketing continually speak different languages.
Most marketing teams are under more pressure than ever before to get results. They're stuck in the false struggle continually diagnosing marketing tactics looking for bumps in growth without ever getting in a better place to hit the next goal.
We're on a mission to help marketing teams get out of the false struggle and drive real sustainable growth.
All of this talk about revenue at all costs in B2B Marketing—Revenue as the main KPI and now marketers claiming we're in the revenue era—we take this topic on again for an updated look at if we're really in the Revenue Era or is something else going on.
B2B Marketers are now focused on the dark funnel and dark social for their go to market strategy. Is this the greatest trend in B2B marketing or is it just a bunch of nonsense?
Is the key to creating demand inspiring and entertaining your buyers and how do you do this as a B2B marketer?
With every martech vendor and agency pushing to measure marketing on revenue or bust we take this topic head on to discuss if B2B marketers should truly be measured on revenue as their main KPI or is the pendulum swinging too far to one side?
Highly Questionable Marketing heavily questions a lot of the advice given to B2B marketers, but we take a bit of a different approach. We find posts that we love and do a deeper dive into why we love them. The pendulum continually swings too far to revenue for B2B marketers and you need in-house and outsourced talent to drive growth going into 2022.
In this episode, Jay and Joergen sit down and talk about a few posts they love and one person they enjoy every post from on LinkedIn.
We break down our 2022 predictions for next year—some of them highly questionable. Will marketing finally get a breakout year or is sales-led still the main go to market strategy for the foreseeable future? Not everything is a prediction—some opportunities for marketers to capture going into 2022 as well.
We breakdown an ad targeted at B2B marketers with 10 "quick" pipeline hacks you can implement in a crunch. Is this just some highly questionable marketing or is this something marketing teams should execute on. We also give some more practical marketing advice as we breakdown each hack.
Lead-based top of the funnel marketing is not effective as it used to be—but does that mean you should completely kill it? There's been a lot of discussion on splitting the funnel to focus on finding more high-intent buyers, but that sounds a lot easier said then done. We discuss splitting the funnel and the challenges that come with being a practical marketer trying to drive growth with this approach.
We go a little long this week to have a more casual discussion around two fun topics—first what is the biggest mistake B2B marketing teams make—with two slightly different takes centered around no scalable growth lever and not getting the story right. We transition off the beaten path to talk about the latest Drift moves with a new Chief Brand Officer and what this means for Drift and what this means for Dave Gerhardt.
There's some fierce debate going on with the most successful ways to measure B2B marketers. The wrong KPIs and metrics incentivize the wrong behavior. There's been a stronger push to measuring B2B marketers on revenue and Sales Qualified Opportunities. This sounds great but we want to dive deeper and make sure this is the best path forward for marketing teams. We then tackle the KPI question head on and try to discuss which marketing KPIs make the most sense for marketing teams.
Join Jay Baron, CEO Elevate Demand and Joergen Aaobe VP of Marketing as they discuss two hot topics—is Product-Led Growth simply a free trial, and what about the other "led growths". And we go deep into the idea that creativity can be your competitive in advantage in B2B marketing.
Lots of buzz around category creation today as the main way growth lever for B2B SaaS and B2B marketing. We debate if creating a category is just another hype filled buzzword with vague promises of differentation and more revenue or if it really is something B2B marketing teams should put considerable time, energy, and resources (money) behind.
Unpopular opinion-marketing should not be running A/B tests to find better ads, better copy, better landing pages. Great B2B marketers continually learn and adjust to find the best combinations to create demand and drive growth. In this episode Jay Baron CEO of Elevate Demand is joined by Jorgen Aaboe and Liz Conn to debate if A/B tests drive meaningful results in marketing and discuss what comes first in marketing-strategy or tactics.
Jay Baron CEO of Elevate Demand is joined by Joergen Aaboe VP of Marketing and Elizabeth Conn VP of Growth Marketing for 2 new B2B marketing hot takes. They'll discuss if marketing should pass their leads to SDRs and even if SDRs should sit under sales or marketing. Then they break down if marketing is about numbers or people.
Jay Baron CEO of Elevate Demand brings Joergen Aaboe VP of Marketing and Elizabeth Conn Director of Growth Marketing bring you 2 hot takes with some hotly debated topics. They'll discuss if lead generation is dead is really dead in B2B and break down the idea that your team is your greatest differentiator.
Jay Baron CEO of Elevate Demand and Joergen Aaboe VP of Marketing bring you two hot takes on two great topics. Does brand marketing really create demand for B2B companies? Should your marketing team invest time and energy creating a category?